Music Smooth As Fog
by Marge Simon
Editorial
Please Fix, Do Not Eliminate, The Semiprozine Hugo
Fiction
The Midnight Girls No Cord Or Cable In The Middle of Nowhere With Company Flash Deep Moves
by Wendy S. Delmater, Publisher and Editor-In-Chief
by Lisa A. Koosis
by Bud Sparhawk
by Aliette de Bodard
by Ruth Nestvold
by William Highsmith
by Howard V. Hendrix
by Paul Christian Stevens
by Marge Ballif Simon
The nurse thinks I’m asleep,
but I never swallow her pills.
I know how to get outside if I want to.
Not very far, just on the ledge,
if I’m careful to shut the drapes
and leave the window open.
I like it there. The alley below
is very old, a lair for scavengers.
Their music is pale and wet,
Smooth as fog. I can smell the ocean
underneath the oily fumes,
watch the night things dance.
Long and tall their shadows
rise almost to my ledge.
I can pull their darkness over me as a veil.
When I make my way back inside,
there is blood on my tongue.
Marge Ballif Simon free lances as a writer poet illustrator for genre and mainstream publications such as Strange Horizons, Flashquake, Sniplits, Vestal Review, Flash Me Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, Dreams & Nightmares. She edits a column for the HWA Newsletter, "Blood & Spades: Poets of the Dark Side. She is the editor of Star*Line, Digest of the SF Poetry Association. In addition to her poetry, she has published two prose collections: _Christina's World_, Sam's Dot Publications, 2008 and _Like Birds in the Rain_. Sam's Dot, 2007. She won the Bram Stoker for Best Poetry Collection with Charlie Jacob, _Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet_, Dark Regions Press, 2008. A new collection, _Unearthly Delights_ (self illustrated in color) is forthcoming from Sam's Dot Publications, 2009. She and her husband, Bruce Boston, don't own cell phones and are not on Twitter. They are waiting for something better to come along.